Food for Children: Charitable Cause

Updated: Apr 11

Introduction

I live together with a Xhosa family. We are neighbours, but without walls, so we share daily life together from sunrise to sunset. And within this family, there are Four Little Ones under the age of 5. One has no father and an absent mother. Two have been abandoned. And one has an illiterate father and mother. These Four Little Ones have weaved strong cords into my heart, and it is for them that I write this.

Brief Context

There is a generation of parents today who did not attend school back in the 70's, 80's and 90's, because it was too difficult to walk 3km to school every morning on an empty stomach, then sit in a classroom all morning on an empty stomach, then walk home again in the afternoon, still on an empty stomach, wondering if there would be a meal for the night or not. So most of this generation dropped out of school to search for food instead. The result has been a lost generation, displaced and cut off from ancestral knowledge, reliant on the industrialized supply chain for staple needs, unqualified to enter the job market, without knowledge and skills of how to earn an income to meet daily needs, let alone calculate, what these needs are, yet with lives to live and children to feed regardless. It's a tough situation with a looooong history and many more layers.

Reality Check

Undernourishment is a real thing out here, and this is what has touched my heart, every morning when the children come to greet me, with running noses, relentless coughs, and mucky eyes.

Random Compassion

At the end of 2023 I was in conversation with the ePap Foundation, figuring out how to supply the Four Little Ones with all their nutritional needs, for a full years supply of fortified, balanced and super nourishing food. The idea was to create an ongoing food supply for all their pre and schooling years, affording them optimal nutrition for physical health, cognitive function and emotional wellbeing. At the very least, just keeping these children away from the suffering of hunger and the daily uncertainty of whether they will eat or not.

The food scientists did their calculations and informed me, and then I waited. Early in 2024, a friend offered to help financially, and in February we took delivery of, and handed over 40kg of highly nutritious and powerfully fortified, crushed whole maize and soya beans, which can be used as a porridge, and as a pap, to feed all humans from age 2 upward. This was predicted to supply the Four Little Ones with all their nutritional needs for the whole of 2024.

But then reality kicked in.

Due to worms and parasites, and the fact that these children have been under nourished since birth, they have been eating considerably more ePap than we calculated for. Add to this the fact that makhulu (the grandmother - seated in the middle of the photo above) who cares for the Four Little Ones, is someone who regularly takes in orphans, abandoned and lost children, means that we are short on our food supply and will probably run out at the end of April 2024.

The Bottom Line

We need R10'000 (South African Rands) to buy another 135kg of ePap, and this should - at least - take us through to the end of January, which also buys time to look deeper into whether there is a more sustainable solution for 2025 onward, or whether this challenge is one that can only be met with charity.

UPDATE April 11: We've reached halfway, only R5000 needed!!